Magic the Gathering: Commander

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Magic: The Gathering Commander is composed of five different hundred-card decks, with no card other than basic lands appearing more than once per deck. There are a total of 51 new Magic cards spread across them. And each deck comes with three foil oversized versions of legends that also appear as regular cards in the deck. You can buy one of these decks and play it out of the box, or cannibalize it for your existing EDH decks. Sorry, that should now be "your existing Magic: The Gathering Commander decks."

The 51 new cards will be legal in Eternal formats (that's Vintage and Legacy), but they will not be legal in Standard, Extended, or Block Constructed.

Just checking in to say I’m super excited. New cards AND generals AND oversized foils? 3 Generals per deck? I’ll probably buy all 5 on principal and i’ve held out on Planechase and Archenemeny [love them both but i’ve resisted].

Disciple of Yawgmoth

Wow… a new Magic product I might actually purchase. All I ever hear is EDH this and EDH that… this may just be the thing to get me to actually try it. (as I’ve never mustered up the resolve to pillage my existing decks in order to make an EDH deck)

PS- how clever is calling White-Black-Red ‘Newspaper’? it seems to fit very well, considering what those three colors put together tend to do.
(Control Board/Kill Things)
AND
how broken will Infect + Proliferate be in EDH if we get a decent ‘Phyrexia’ colored Commander?
FINALLY
what kinds of decks do ‘Mother Nature’ builds tend to do?
aggro? control? combo? wierdness?

Amokat

“Mother Nature,” as you call it, is the wild card in the scenario – not often played, and the only card we have to think about is intet the dreamer – and hes just a little weird. I’m excited.

also, as to “newspaper” (which incidentally i do not like as a name) that GIANT WAR MONSTER THING looks like a pretty interesting possible RWB general.

Amokat

Karador is silly wonderful nonsense. They have set the bar pretty freakin high with these generals, here’s hoping they all deliver.

Raz

I didn’t like it either, then I thought about it. It’s actually mildly clever. Good throwback to being 8 and having terrible jokes

5 decks, 3 of them triple-enemy coloured.
if theyre all 3 coloured, its like GWU, UBR, RGU, GWB and BRW.
awesome

Saccharum

I think the name is awesome :)

The Mohawk

Intet is actually a chick, not a dude, just thought I’d throw that out there

http://gravatar.com/incredisteve IncrediSteve

Since baseless speculation is what these threads are all about, I think, based on the art, GIANT WAR MONSTER THING is a Titan with Double Strike and a Ghostly Prison effect [the crown of swords looks an awful lot like the FNM promo of ghostly prison, and MTG art has lately been representing double strike by a pair of jagged blades].

Saccharum

Ok, so they say that they will have 3 oversized legends, but RUG only has one legend in its colors right now… Does that mean that they are making 2 new generals for each color combo? (or at least for RUG?)

plane chase is amazing i play 6 person edh planchase every friday my general is khrona the false god and wort the raid mother and zur

EmillLang1000

I’m curious as to how these cards are going to fit into Standard.
Will these cards be previews for the next, post-Mirrodin set, or will these be stand-alone cards that won’t be featured in anything besides the Commander decks.

smashmart

i think he will have some sort of “take an extra combat step” ability

Boba’s Dad

I think it’s absolutely brilliant of WotC to put new cards in a product like this. It’s a great incentive for vintage/legacy/casual players to pick up the decks. I’m definately going to check these out!

http://en.gravatar.com/incredisteve IncrediSteve

Oh of course Planechase is awesome; I just mean I didn’t buy every single one [picked up 2 and got the remaining planes I wanted online].
Map of the Blind Eternities is the best, if you can spare the table space for it.

They’re going straight into Eternal; IE skipping Standard and Extended and going straight into Legacy and Vintage. I’m guessing they’ll all be splashy 5+ CMC spells that will have absolutely 0 impact on that format.

joekickazz

I don’t know Karador’s graveyard affinity seems abusable enough. I could see him or another legend making a small impact.

Darth Parallax

The spoiled art that we do not yet have a card for is pretty clearly BRW. not much white about him, but in enemy wedges, if he’s BR, he has to be BRW.

“Newspaper” is almost certainly going to be the most annoying. either the card quality will be too low, which will be annoying for a very different reason, or we’ll be getting Wraths and Shattering Sprees and the like, which will be devastating.

The good news is, all the wedges have the possibility to have overpowered interactions like this. If you think of ‘Newspaper’ as ‘everybody dies but me’, then it’s not much of a stretch to see ‘Dredge’ as “Nobody ever stays dead” with the game in a pretty much constant state of ‘Yawgmoth’s Will’ interacting with Dredge, Unearth, Threshold, and other Grave-based effects.

Paired against each other, these decks will be reasonably balanced. If however, their ‘themes’ are isolated and improved- taking out the lame cards and replacing them with cards that do ‘the same thing, only better’ (the fate of most pre-con decks), then they will probably be a force to be reckoned with compared to the majority of decks out there. Karador is powerful. exceedingly so. find the best 99 cards in the game that make Karador the most effective he can be, and you’ll clean house.

imagine what the other Commanders must be capable of. these decks will be scary at first sight, lame precons at second glance, and then pros will rebuild them into engines of destruction the likes of which hell hath no fury like.

Nicol Bolas needs an oversized Mythic Rare foil with FTV art.

DUED

WHICH IS AWeSOME!!!

DUED

so yeah i already have a pretty absurd teneb deck and all i can think about is how much hate i am going to draw after these things get released
(btw sun titan + eternal witness + animate dead + board wipe is cheating)

At first I thought Death by Dragons would be the bane of Archenemies. Now I see that Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund will be a very popular answer/combo with it. It’s just the sort of thing an evil genius would do-

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